A medical doctor and art collector from Essen, Germany, Thomas Olbricht, two years ago set up Me Collectors Room, a contemporary art venue in Berlin which, like La Maison Rouge, hosts temporary exhibitions. The Olbricht collection, one of the biggest in Germany, comprises in excess of 2,500 works, a selection of which is on permanent show at Me Collectors Room. This is the first time the collection has travelled to France.

The Olbricht collection is remarkable for its scope, as it covers a period of five hundred years from the 16th to the 21st centuries and takes in a huge diversity of media and genres, from engravings by Albrecht Durer, Martin Schongauer and Francisco de Goya to others by the Chapman brothers; from photographs by Robert Capa to prints by Cindy Sherman and Vic Muniz; from paintings of the Flemish and Italian schools to the work of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Allan McCollum; from Renaissance ivory statuettes to bronzes by Thomas Schuette and wax sculptures by Berlinde de Bruyckere.

Thomas Olbricht's journey through the history of art is guided by powerful themes. They inform his choices, run throughout the collection, and connect the works despite their different eras, media and statuses.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled 464, 2008, C-Print, 214.3 x 152.4cm

Death and its representation, vanity, religious faith, war, the fragility and beauty of the female body, and artists' renderings of the strange and the marvellous, make this a unique and highly disconcerting collection.

One of its most striking objects is the reconstruction of a Kunst und Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities). A Renaissance precursor to the western concept of the museum, these cabinets are a collection of objects intended to further wonderment and knowledge, and an attempt to understand the world and how art, nature and science interrelate.

For the past twenty years, Thomas Olbricht has been compiling a collection of contemporary art which he shows alongside this historic collection. Olbricht's eclectic choices are guided solely by his insatiable passion for art. He brings artists which history and sometimes the market have acknowledged, together with little-known young artists from around the world. Profoundly post-modern, narrative and figurative for the most part, these young artists view the art of centuries past with curiosity, willingly drawing inspiration from, and measuring themselves against, their masters.

This selection of some 150 works gives insight into an original collector with an unerring eye.